12391 - 20170312 - Lucie Stahl's first U.S. solo museum exhibition premieres at the Dallas Museum of Art - Dallas, TX - 16.09.2016-12.03.2017

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Untitled (Foxy Mega), 2014. Inkjet print, aluminum, epoxy resin. Overall: 65.7 x 47.2 x 1 in. (167 x 120 x 2.5 cm). Glenn Glasser © Lucie Stahl.

 

The Dallas Museum of Art presents Concentrations 60: Lucie Stahl, an immersive installation of new and loaned work by the Berlin-based artist. In the artist’s first US solo museum show, Stahl explores the intersection of nostalgia, patriotism, Americana, and surreality. The exhibition, which is on view September 16, 2016, through March 12, 2017, is part of the Museum’s Concentrations series of project-based solo exhibitions by international emerging artists. This year marks the 35th anniversary of the series, which began in 1981 as part of the DMA’s commitment to the work of living artists.

“Contemporary art and artists have been an important focus throughout my career, and as the new Director of the Dallas Museum of Art, I am especially pleased to continue our legacy of providing a platform for engaging new artists through the Concentrations series,” said Agustín Arteaga, The Eugene McDermott Director of the DMA. “Over the past three decades, Concentrations has featured over sixty emerging artists, and we continue that impressive heritage now and as the first museum in the United States to present a solo installation by Lucie Stahl.”

Stahl utilizes a flatbed scanner to create large-format images in which various objects such as food, photographs, magazine clippings, and trash appear to emerge from a dark abyss. The resulting images are encased in resin, giving them a glossy, tactile finish and distinct material presence. Stahl’s work plays with the notion of liquidity in its many forms—from finance to bodily fluids to the malleability of gender, identity, and images. In all her work, the artist explores the trappings of modern-day consumer culture through found objects and imagery, addressing branding, consumption, addiction/dependency, and excess.

For Concentrations 60, Stahl has created a new body of fourteen resin-encased poster works together with a grouping of Prayer Wheels—found soda and beer cans that have been transformed into post-apocalyptic kinetic sculptures. Of these pseudo-devotional forms, the artist explains: “When I transform old Coke or beer cans found in the California desert, where they’ve been used for target shooting since forever, into prayer wheels, the work starts to open up to all these issues art history is always drowning in—national identity, romanticism, nature—mixed with the loss of religion, which has been replaced by an almost folkish attachment to consumer goods.”

“Visitors will be left questioning contemporary notions of consumption and dependency. Lucie’s work may even trigger a deeper reflection on modern consumer culture,” said Gavin Delahunty, Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the DMA. “There is an observable post-apocalyptic feel to Stahl’s work and yet her work does not lack an optimistic outlook.”

Lucie Stahl was born in 1977 in Berlin, where she currently lives and works. She studied at the Berlin University of the Arts, Glasgow School of Art, and Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main. Recent solo exhibitions include presentations at Halle für Kunst, Lüneburg (2016); Queer Thoughts, Chicago (2014); Freedman Fitzpatrick, Los Angeles (2014); Neue Alte Brücke, Frankfurt am Main (2014); and dépendance, Brussels (2012). She has participated in group exhibitions, including the 9th Berlin Biennale (2016); The 13th Biennale de Lyon, Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon (2015); Mirror Effect, The Box, Los Angeles (2015); DOOM: Surface Contrôle, Le Magasin, Grenoble (2014); and Puddle, Pothole, Portal, Sculpture Center, New York (2014). Stahl has been awarded residencies at Hessische Kulturstiftung, London (2014) and MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles (2012). Together with Will Benedict she ran the exhibition space Pro Choice in Vienna from 2008 to 2012.

Concentrations 60: Lucie Stahl is organized by the Dallas Museum of Art. The exhibition is curated by Gabriel Ritter, the former Nancy and Tim Hanley Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the DMA, with the support of Nolan Jimbo, Temporary Project Coordinator. The exhibition will be accompanied by a brochure featuring an interview between the artist and exhibition curator. The presentation is made possible by TWO x TWO for AIDS and Art, an annual fundraising event that jointly benefits amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research and the Dallas Museum of Art, and by the Contemporary Art Initiative. The exhibition is included in free general admission.

 

 

Website : Dallas Museum of Art

 

 Source : Artdaily

 

12390 - 20170312 - "Apostles of Nature: Jugendstil and Art Nouveau" at LACMA - Los Angeles - 13.08.2016-12.03.2017

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Villeroy & Boch and Franz Ringer, Jugendstil Design Teacup and Saucer, 1912, stoneware with painted and molded decoration, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Ellen Palevsky Cup Collection, gift of Max Palevsky, photo © Museum Associates/LACMA.

 

 Organized by LACMA’s Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies, Apostles of Nature: Jugendstil and Art Nouveau explores the popular late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century style known as Art Nouveau in France and Jugendstil in Germany. Inspired by the British Arts and Crafts movement, which celebrated craft in an age of advancing industrialization, as well as by Symbolist and Romantic painting, Japanese prints, and folk art, European artists developed a style characterized by highly decorative forms drawn from nature, with curvilinear, serpentine lines and daring whiplashes of color. Art Nouveau quickly spread beyond France and Germany, influencing a range of artistic movements and artists’ groups, including the Vienna Secession and the Wiener Werkstätte in Austria.

Despite disparate goals, approaches, and materials, Art Nouveau artists across Europe were unified in their desire to make beautiful things, and to make life more beautiful in turn. This exhibition brings together more than 50 objects from across the museum’s collections, including prints, posters, books, decorative arts, and textiles, to illustrate the movement’s efforts to create integrated, total works of art, or Gesamtkunstwerke, that would bring aesthetic ideals to bear on everyday modern life.

In the late nineteenth century, European artists and designers came together to develop a style characterized by highly decorative forms drawn from nature, with curvilinear, serpentine lines and daring whiplashes of color. They were inspired by the British Arts and Crafts movement, which celebrated craft in an age of advancing industrialization, as well as by Symbolist and Romantic painting, Japanese prints, and folk art. Called Art Nouveau in France and Jugendstil in Germany, this style became associated with a range of artistic movements and artists’ groups, including the Vienna Secession and the Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshop) in Austria. Reaching the height of its popularity around 1900, Art Nouveau in many ways embodied the contradictions of a time of great transition. Some sought to imbue Art Nouveau with a strong sense of national identity, while others viewed it as a universalizing European style. The movement was also split by differing attitudes toward handmade craft versus mass production, and by the question of Art Nouveau’s intended consumers, with lesser-quality objects made for the general public existing alongside those fashioned as luxury items for an elite clientele. Despite their disparate goals, approaches, and materials, Art Nouveau artists were unified in their desire to make beautiful things, and to make life more beautiful in turn. This exhibition brings together objects from across the museum’s collections, including prints, posters, books, decorative arts, and textiles, to illustrate the movement’s efforts to create an integrated, total work of art, or Gesamtkunstwerk, that would bring aesthetic ideals to bear on everyday modern life.

Alphonse Mucha
Alphonse Mucha became synonymous with French Art Nouveau after the overnight success, in 1895, of a poster he designed for a play featuring the celebrated actress Sarah Bernhardt. Mucha, who had moved to Paris in 1887, was born and raised in what is now the Czech Republic, a region with strong folk art and craft traditions that were the source of many of the artist’s stylistic signatures. He integrated ornate motifs into everything from restaurant menus and calendars to jewelry, theater sets, and advertising posters that often featured glamorous, semiclad women. Mucha’s rise coincided with—and was no doubt fueled by—a dramatic increase in poster production in France and across Europe, where the visual landscape of major cities was transformed by signs of conspicuous consumption.

The Wiener Werkstätte
Founded in 1902, the Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshop) grew out of the Vienna Secession, a group of artists who broke with the conservatism of the Association of Austrian Artists in 1897 to create art more responsive to their time. Directly influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement, architect Josef Hoffmann and designer Koloman Moser established workshops for all manner of decorative and applied arts, including metalwork, bookbinding, leatherwork, wood and lacquerwork, and architecture. They opposed mass production, insisting on exquisite objects handmade by skilled craftsmen. Before the Werkstätte dissolved in 1932, its artists had designed ceramics, typefaces, textiles, women’s fashions, and domestic interiors, examples of which had been shown at the most significant exhibitions of the early twentieth century. Despite their constant financial struggles, they created a model for uniting art and craft that would inspire other European workshops such as the Bauhaus.

Carl Otto Czeschka
Carl Otto Czeschka was one of the leading artists of the Wiener Werkstätte, which he joined in 1905. His designs signaled a shift in the Werkstätte’s style, retreating from the spare geometry favored by Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser and moving towards a more decorative, folk art–inflected sensibility that tied them closer to Art Nouveau. Czeschka was multitalented, creating designs for furniture, metalwork, textiles, and jewelry, although he is perhaps best known for his graphic design. His illustrations for Franz Keim’s version of the Nibelung saga, Die Nibelungen, show stylized soldiers, knights, and royalty enmeshed in decorative pattern and ornament, arrayed across the page as in a sculptural frieze. Czeschka also contributed to the Werkstätte’s major commission in Brussels, the Palais Stoclet, and designed many of the whimsical program books of the Cabaret Fledermaus.

Jugen
Founded by Georg Hirth in 1896, the periodical Jugend (Youth) was published weekly in Munich until 1940. Jugend quickly became the namesake of the artistic and literary movement known in Germany as Jugendstil and elsewhere as Art Nouveau, although the style of works included in Jugend varied widely. A number of artists became indelibly associated with the magazine, in particular Hans Christiansen, who designed a number of iconic covers with audaciously vibrant palettes and seductively rendered female figures in mythical surroundings. Other key Jugendstil designers also contributed, including Bruno Paul, Richard Riemerschmid, and Otto Eckmann, filling the pages of Jugend with abstracted floral designs and curved lines that framed literary and critical texts.

 

 

Website : LACMA

 

Source : Artdaily

 

12389 - 20170219 - Queens Museum opens first survey of the 50-year career of pioneering performance artist Mierle Laderman - Queens, NY - 18.09.2016-19.02.2017

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Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Landing: Cantilevered Overlook, 2008–ongoing. Permanent environmental public artwork for South Park, Freshkills Staten Island, NY. Created as part of Ukeles’s Percent for Art commission for Freshkills Park. Courtesy of Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, rendering: W X Y Architecture and Urban Design

 

The Queens Museum opened Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art, the first survey exhibition of the pioneering American artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles. On view September 18, 2016 through February 19, 2017, the exhibition features newly imagined historic performances, sculptural works, and current works-in-process as new site-specific installations, often using the unique features of the Queens Museum. These include a light path tracking her seminal performance 1979 Touch Sanitation across the surface of the Panorama of the City of New York and Pulse II, fourteen Sanitation truck “flashers” blinking and signaling along the Museum’s west façade. The exhibition also includes photo and text based works related to dozens of performances that ranged from hours to months in duration as well as proposals, planning documents, and models for major realized and unrealized temporary and permanent public projects.

“Over the course of her groundbreaking career, Ukeles has addressed some of the most complex societal issues of our times, including the role of women in society, environmental sustainability, freedom, and civic responsibility,” said Laura Raicovich, President and Executive Director of the Queens Museum. “Her work is a guidestar and inspiration to new generations of artists working to engage social issues, and the character, inclusiveness, reciprocity, and scalability of Ukeles’ work embodies the ‘openness’ that is part of the distinctive mission of the Queens Museum.”

Dedicating all of the Museum’s temporary exhibition spaces to one artist—a first for the Museum—Maintenance Art is the most significant presentation of Ukeles’ work ever assembled in one place. The exhibition is organized by Queens Museum curator Larissa Harris and guest curator Patricia C. Phillips.

“As the New York Sanitation Department's Artist-in-Residence, Mierle Laderman Ukeles' art has brought wide public attention to the difficult work performed each and every day by the dedicated men and women of the DSNY,” said Commissioner Kathryn Garcia. “From Touch Sanitation, in 1979 to her current project at Freshkills Park, the department's relationship with Ukeles has demonstrated how effective and thought provoking an artist residency can be and served as a model for current and future city agency artist residencies."

With works dating from 1962 to 2016, Maintenance Art traces Ukeles’ career as a feminist performance artist, her almost forty-year tenure as the official, unsalaried Artist-in-Residence at New York City’s Department of Sanitation, and as an artist whose Jewish faith has fueled a firm belief in the capacity of the human spirit.

“I became an artist to be free: free to use the gifts given to me by my artist heroes. In 1968, we were blessed to have a child and we fell madly in love with her. I became a maintenance worker, not only to do the work necessary to keep her alive but to do the work to help her thrive! I discovered that heroes Jackson [Pollock], Marcel [Duchamp] and Mark [Rothko] didn’t change diapers; I fell out of their picture. I didn’t want to be two separate people—the maintenance worker and the free artist—living in one body,” said Ukeles. “In October, 1969, an epiphany! If I am the boss of my boundless freedom, I name Maintenance – Art. In a quiet rage, in one sitting, I wrote the MANIFESTO FOR MAINTENANCE ART, 1969! At that time, there was no recognition, and very little honor for service work and service workers: those at home and those who work outside. And little care for the needs of the finite planet-as-home. So I set out to make this visible, i.e. to make a revolution with everyone in the picture. After making maintenance art myself and with one or two workers, then 300 maintenance workers in 1976, I got a call from the Sanitation Department: “How would you like to make art with 10,000 NYC sanitation workers?” “I’ll be right over.” I replied. I have been very lucky to have officials and workers and the art world willing to open all the doors, to take a risk and say ‘Yes. Yes!’ Welcome to the results.”

Exhibition highlights include:

• Early Work (Air Art)

• Engaged with the ecological and the urban since the early 60s, Ukeles proposed and fabricated inflatable sculptures and wearables in organic shapes for appending to existing architecture, engaging land, sea and air, and/or creating independent architecture for individuals and groups. After use, they were supposed to be deflated, folded, and put away. But the facture, care and maintenance (they leaked!) of these symbols of freedom were so serious that they, along with the birth of her first child, helped trigger the insights in Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969!. Drawings and plans for a selection of Air Art will be on view for the first time anywhere.

• Maintenance Art

• The original four page artwork, Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! is presented alone on a wall as the artist considers it: “a sculpture that is a text.” Drawing on the principles of her Manifesto, Ukeles, along with works that traveled with the exhibition, conceived more than a dozen Maintenance Art Performances for curator Lucy Lippard’s traveling exhibition of feminist conceptual art, c. 7500 (1973-1974). Along with washing its steps and gallery floors, Ukeles intervened in the Wadsworth Athenaeum’s security and conservation systems; raked and tracked falling leaves on the campus of Vassar College; scrubbed a Soho sidewalk in front of the original A.i.R. Gallery and interviewed passersby about their maintenance habits. The exhibition includes the entire Maintenance Art Works series and newly discovered ephemera related to this extraordinary body of work.

• An important leap came in 1976, when Ukeles invited 300 maintenance workers at a downtown office building to consider one hour of their eight hour work shift to be “maintenance art.” She then took Polaroids of the employees at work and asked them whether, in their opinion, her camera had captured them during their hour of art, or their seven hours of work. The 704 original Polaroids, labeled with each workers’ decision, that make up I Make Maintenance Art One Hour Every Day will be on view for the first time since the work was created in 1976.

• When a review of the above exhibition suggested that the Sanitation Department (affected by NYC’s fiscal crisis) might want to apply for funds for performance art, Ukeles contacted and was welcomed by the Commissioner of the Department of Sanitation into what was at first an undefined research role but would evolve into the unique position of official, unsalaried Artist-in-Residence. This provided Ukeles an opportunity to scale up her engagement with maintenance as a cultural idea in the “big leagues” of sanitation and continues to this day.

• Touch Sanitation Performance (1979-1980) and Touch Sanitation Show (1984)

• Ukeles’ first performance with DSNY was Touch Sanitation, in which she faced and shook the hand of all 8,500 Sanitation employees as they did their work on streets and Sanitation facilities and offices, saying to each, “Thank you for keeping New York City alive.” Tiny, moving lights installed on the Museum’s Panorama of the City of New York map the complex, spiraling route Ukeles took while executing this eleven-month performance, an unprecedented act of alliance across gender boundaries in an attempt to forge a grand coalition between ecofeminism and service work. A 20-minute sound piece created with Stephen Erickson from field recordings of the entire Sanitation system and Ukeles’ conversations with “sanmen” will be reconfigured for the hall containing the Panorama surrounding the visitor with the sounds of the city and the voices of its workers. For this exhibition, Ukeles has also assembled new works relating to this performance from hundreds of photographs, telexes, annotated maps and related ephemera.

• One Year’s Worktime II, in which a full year of work shifts in the form of clock faces have been silk-screened over a gradient of colors representing the seasons, fully occupies the Queens Museum’s 100-foot, 45-foot High Large Wall. Pulse II delicately animates its 200-foot west facade with fourteen three light blinkers salvaged from the backs of defunct Sanitation trucks. These works (and above mentioned sound piece, Trax for Trux and Barges) were originally seen in Ukeles’ massive and complex two site Touch Sanitation Show, 1984, which is itself presented to the public for the first time in this exhibition, through architectural models, planning documents, and newly unearthed photo- and video-documentation.

• Work Ballets (1983-2012) + Social Mirror (1983)

• Since 1983 Ukeles has staged seven Work Ballets in New York, Rotterdam, Pittsburgh, Givors, France, and Echigo Tsumari, Japan, working with the drivers of heavy duty vehicles to co-design delightful performances in which their work trucks and barges, often laden with hundreds of tons of recyclables, are the dancers. For the first time, video documentation of six of these ballets will be on display, along with selected choreography drawings used in planning sessions. Social Mirror (1983), a garbage truck clad in mirror created as part of her first work ballet, and featured in exhibitions and parades ever since, will appear at the Museum’s east entrance on Saturdays throughout the exhibition, and on the Sundays when exhibition-related events are scheduled, for a total of 31 days on view.

• Ceremonial Arch (1988/1994/2016)

• First created in 1988 for an exhibition at the World Financial Center and newly recreated for this exhibition, Ceremonial Arch is a celebration of the hands and enduring spirits that keep New York City functioning. The social process that defines this work is a “harvest” of thousands of work gloves being collected now from workers at a range of city agencies, ConEdison, and the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA). These gloves sprout in a leafy canopy that reaches more than 14 feet high and 9 feet long over six sturdy columns wrought from the tools of the trade at the FDNY, NYPD, DSNY, NYC DOT, MTA, and USPS.

• Inner City Outer Space: Landfills and Transformation (1978-Present)

• Since the start of her tenure at the Department of Sanitation, Ukeles has envisioned landfills as new public spaces—earthworks that we ourselves have made and own. A range of proposals and artworks from nearly forty years of work will be displayed together for the first time on five walls surrounding Queens Museum’s central skylit atrium, both focusing on Fresh Kills—one of the world’s largest landfills—and sites in other cities and countries. Landing,estimated to be constructed in 2018, is a three part work: an overlook and two earthworks sited at the heart of what was formerly the Fresh Kills Landfill and what is becoming Freshkills Park. A life size photo of the two-mile-long view across the transforming site allows viewers to envision what it will be like to experience the completed work.

• Repair Room including Light Up Philadelphia (1987), Unburning Freedom Hall (1997) and Birthing Tikkun Olam (2008/2009/2016)

• Repair Room presents new iterations of an unrealized citywide public project and two large site specific installations. Taken together, the works suggest the possibility of repair and transformation of a radically torn social fabric. Light Up Philadelphia (1987) proposed to suffuse the monumental statues of different races on Philadelphia’s City Hall and eleven other sites around the city with healing light. Research for this proposal uncovered the story of Pennsylvania "Freedom" Hall, a “Temple of Free Speech” built by women and free African Americans in 1838 then burned to the ground by rioters three days later.

• Originally installed at MoCA, Los Angeles in 1997, Unburning Freedom Hall used the same story as a response to the riots sparked by the 1992 Rodney Kingpolice abuse trial, the worst civil disturbance in the history of the US. Repair Room contains photo-documentation of the installation—a central blue glass table amidst mountains made of shattered glass—and video documentation of the collaborative process in which a range of municipal workers, students and museum visitors produced “Unburnings,” 1,700 glass jars containing unique artworks in an effort to “unburn” or undo civic trauma. The Peace Table (1997) was also a site for Peace Talks convenings on different kinds of peace from personal to citywide.

• Birthing Tikkun Olam, first installed at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, is based on the artist’s interpretation of the Kabbalistic creation story. In a symbolic assembly of objects including a broken crystal goblet, a curtain or “veil” and many hand mirrors with taped blank covenants on the back, visitors are asked to answer Ukeles’ call to look in the mirror then to create a covenant with her and the artwork by committing themselves to acts of “tikkun olam” or repairing the world. Embodying the call and response relationship between Ukeles and members of communities she has engaged, the grouping of these works crystallizes her deep engagement with human agency and transformation, secular and spiritual.

• Talks at the Peace Table and an artist’s tour of Fresh Kills

• Ukeles and the museum have co-conceived a series of public programs during the course of the exhibition to engage and contemporize some of its important ideas and themes. Four three-hour roundtable conversations with activists, artists, city workers and other experts at the Peace Table (1997) (see above) which hangs from the 50-foot vaulted ceiling in the center of the Museum, will be rounded out by a guided tour of Freshkills Park including the future site of Ukeles’ major public artwork Landing. The Queens Museum Education Department will also hold its classes and workshops around the Peace Table.

 

 

Website : Queens Museum

 

Source : Artdaily

 

12388 - 20170206 - Exhibition includes photographs from all four Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh - 23.07.2016-06.02.2017

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Eugène Atget; Boutique Fleurs (Flower Shop), 1925; gelatin silver print; Carnegie Museum of Art, Gift of Duane Michals.

 

Strength in Numbers: Photography in Groups brings together nearly 100 photographs from the collections of all four Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh for the very first time. Opening in Gallery One at Carnegie Museum of Art, the exhibition explores how photographers throughout history have used multiple images to create narratives or explore subjects more deeply than is possible with a single picture. Organized around themes of People, Place, and Perspective, Strength in Numbers showcases work from Carnegie Museum of Art, The Andy Warhol Museum, Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and Carnegie Science Center. Together, the collections from these institutions illustrate how powerful photography can be when displayed in groups.

Photographers often seek to better understand others by taking their picture. The theme of People in Strength in Numbers examines the work of photographers who have compiled groups of portraits. August Sander (German, 1876–1964) ambitiously tried to photograph every type of person living in Germany between the World Wars with his series People of the 20th Century. Though ultimately destined to fail, the project provided insight into preoccupations of Weimar-era society and the documentary ability of the camera. More recently, Zanele Muholi (South African, b. 1972) set out to catalogue the marginalized LGBTQ community in South Africa with her powerful project Faces and Phases. As a member of this community herself, Muholi humanizes and gives voice to people who otherwise are silenced. Part of the 2013 Carnegie International, this project has met widespread acclaim, and earned Muholi the International’s Fine Prize for emerging artists.

In the context of Strength in Numbers, Place is a concept that keeps one rooted and yet is always changing. As a foreigner traveling across the US in the mid-2000s, Paul Graham (British, b. 1956) was attuned to the everyday moments and ordinary places that most Americans ignored. With his multi-part photograph Pittsburgh (2004), Graham somehow turns a nondescript motel lawn into a sublime setting. By the late 1800s, Eugene Atget (French, 1857–1927) had settled on Paris as his most significant subject. The city’s old streets and storefronts were under threat from Baron Haussmann’s plan of modernization supported by Emperor Napoleon III. Atget’s series of photographs of small shops destined for demolition are filled with nostalgia, but resigned to the progression of time.

The theme of Perspective refers to the role that both the photographer and the viewer play in making a picture. LaToya Ruby Frazier’s (American, b. 1982) photographs made in her hometown of Braddock, PA, share tender, intimate moments between Frazier and her family with the rest of the world. By inviting viewers behind her camera and into her personal life, the artist gives access to scenes normally off-limits to outsiders. Access is also important to the work of Newsha Tavakolian (Iranian, b. 1981) whose series Hajj, Trip of a Lifetime follows the artist as she goes on a pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Through Tavakolian’s photographs, audiences can experience one of the most important journeys in Islam from the unique perspective of a practicing Muslim.

The exhibition features work dating from as early as 1887 and as recent as 2011 by artists including John Divola, Judy Fiskin, Mike Kelley, Sharon Lockhart, Eadweard Muybridge, Eliot Porter, and Andy Warhol. Strength in Numbers: Photography in Groups is the first exhibition organized for Carnegie Museum of Art by its new curator of photography, Dan Leers.

 

 

Website : Carnegie Museum of Art

 

Source : Artdaily

 

12387 - 20170108 - Ambitious new project by Bruce Nauman on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art - Philadelphia, PA - 18.09.2016-08.01.2017

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Video still from Contrapposto Studies, I through VII, 2015/2016, Bruce Nauman, Courtesy the artist and Sperone Westwater, New York, ©Bruce Nauman/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

 

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is presenting an ambitious new project this fall by Bruce Nauman, one of the most radical and revered artists of our time. Since the 1960s, Nauman’s work has questioned the very nature of what constitutes art and being an artist, probed the possibilities of the body as subject and tool for performance, and explored the relationship between language and meaning. A pioneer of performance art, durational practices, and time-based media, Nauman has established a conceptually rigorous approach across sculpture, sound, installation, film, and video that continues to inspire younger generations of artists working in these forms today.

Timothy Rub, the George D. Widener Director and CEO, stated: “Part of what is extraordinary in Nauman’s work is his ability to choreograph with space, movement and sound. The monumental nature of this new work offers an all-encompassing experience that commands our attention and underscores the Museum’s committment to presenting the most exciting art of our time.”

The installation takes as its point of departure his seminal video work Walk with Contrapposto of 1968, in which the artist performed an exaggerated walk along a tall narrow corridor that he had built in order to stage the action. Nauman’s new work, which is titled Contrapposto Studies, I through VII, consists of seven large scale video projections with sound in an installation specifically scaled for two galleries in the Museum on the occasion of its premiere. In each of the projections, Nauman is seen from two viewpoints walking in contrapposto, his image rendered both in positive and negative, and at times fragmented and stacked in two horizontal strata.

Contrapposto translates as “counterpose” from the Italian and refers to a pose that first appeared in Greek classical sculpture to introduce dynamism into the representation of the figure. Nauman’s original appropriation of the pose in motion in 1968 questioned the boundaries between performance and sculpture through the relatively new medium of video. In 2016, he transforms his original gesture by exposing it to digital manipulation and recombination, which give the appearance of his body alternatively coming together and disintegrating while remaining the stable focus of the composition. The soundtrack of each projection captures the multiplicity of the artist’s movements, which are seen both forwards and backwards, compounding the relationship between the aural and the visual experience of his action. Through the combined effects of Contrapposto Studies, I through VII, Nauman dwells on the history and possibility of representation while elliptically referencing his own biography.

Carlos Basualdo, The Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, said: ”This new work by Nauman is both a video installation and an amazing sound composition. That he has used a foundational moment in the history of Western sculpture to create a rich field of interrelated references, across media as well as time, is a testimony to his status as one of the most important artists working today.”

The installation builds upon the Museum’s deep commitment to the artist. In 2009, the Museum organized a three-site exhibition of his work representing the United States in the 53rd Venice Biennale of 2009 that garnered the Golden Lion for Best National Participation. Following the premiere of Contrapposto Studies, I through VII, the Museum will dedicate one of its permanent collection galleries to a long-term presentation of select works by Nauman.

Working in sculpture, film and video, installation, performance, and sound, Bruce Nauman is one of the most influential artists of his generation. He was born in 1941 in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and studied at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the University of California, Davis. After graduate school, Nauman occupied a storefront studio in the space of an old grocery store in San Francisco. There, an old neon beer sign served as inspiration for Nauman’s celebrated neon, The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (Window or Wall Sign), 1967, which became a major acquisition by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2007. Nauman’s first solo debut in New York was at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1968, and his first major museum survey was co-organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1972. In 1994, Nauman’s traveling retrospective and catalogue raisonné were organized by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, in association with the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. Following the presentation of Bruce Nauman: Topological Gardens at the official U.S. entry to the 53rd Venice Biennale, Nauman’s two new sound works produced in concert with that project, Days and Giorni, had their United States premiere at the Museum in 2009. The artist lives in New Mexico with his wife, the artist Susan Rothenberg.

 

 

Website : Philadelphia Museum of Art

 

 Source : Artdaily

 

12386 - 20170305 - N.C. Museum of Art presents completed Ghissi altarpiece for first time in over 100 years - Raleigh, NC - 10.09.2016-05.03.2017

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Charlotte Caspers, after Francescuccio Ghissi, St. John the Evangelist Baptizing Aristodemus, 2014, tempera and gold leaf on panel, 13 15/16 x 15 3/16 in., North Carolina Museum of Art.

 

Beginning September 10, 2016, the North Carolina Museum of Art presents Reunited: Francescuccio Ghissi’s St. John Altarpiece, the first time in more than 100 years that the altarpiece’s eight known panels—and one recreated missing panel—can be seen and appreciated as one magnificent work of art. The free exhibition will be on view through March 5, 2017.

During the 19th or early 20th century, Ghissi’s St. John Altarpiece was dismantled and sawed apart, and its nine panels were sold separately to art dealers and collectors. Three panels are today in the NCMA’s collection (one panel shown below); one panel is in the Portland Art Museum’s collection; three are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and the central Crucifixion panel is at the Art Institute of Chicago. After more than a century of separation, the individual panels travel to the NCMA to be reunited in an exhibition that retells the story of this Renaissance masterwork.

Because the ninth panel has never been found, the NCMA collaborated with Dutch conservation specialist Charlotte Caspers in taking the extraordinary step to re-create the missing panel using 14th-century materials and techniques. Over the course of several months, Caspers worked with NCMA Curator of European Art David Steel and NCMA Chief Conservator William Brown to determine the probable subject, composition, coloring, and other details; then she created the panel with the same pigments and gilding used by Ghissi 650 years ago.

Once the panel was complete, Duke University mathematicians, led by Ingrid Daubechies, developed algorithms to digitally age Caspers’s work by matching crack patterns found in the eight original panels; a digital print of this virtually aged ninth panel will be installed with the original panels to complete the St. John Altarpiece. Using Caspers’s panel, the team at Duke calculated algorithms to guide them in digitally removing the crack patterns from the original altarpiece’s panels and used a color-mapping technique to approximate the original pigments—thus creating a version of the completed altarpiece as it would have looked in the 14th century.

“It was a true collaboration between conservators, curators, and mathematicians,” says Steel. “Everyone learned from each other’s research, and it resulted in this fascinating exhibition that combines art history, mathematics, and technology.”

In addition to the reunited altarpiece, the exhibition features several conservational, interactive, and educational elements, including:

· A virtual recreation of the altarpiece showing how it might have appeared when it left the artist’s workshop circa 1370

· A video documenting the creation of the missing panel

· A display of pigments similar to those used in the Renaissance with their mineral, insect, and plant sources, as well as brushes and gilding tools

· A video exploring the mathematical algorithmic processes Duke University researchers used to virtually age and revitalize the panels

Walking through the gallery, visitors will be able to travel from the 21st century—studying the technology and mathematics used to virtually re-create the panel—back to the 14th century to see the reunited St. John Altarpiece as it originally appeared together with the materials and techniques used by the artist to create it.

 

 

Website : North Carolina Museum of Art

 

Source : Artdaily

12385 - 20170108 - Asia Society Museum in New York presents "No Limits: Zao Wou-Ki" - New York - 09.09.2016-08.01.2017

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Sans titre (Joueurs de tennis) (Untitled [Tennis players]), 1945. Oil on muslin. 10 5/8 × 13 3/4 in. (27 × 35 cm). Private Collection, Switzerland ©Photography by Dennis Bouchard.

 

“No Limits: Zao Wou-Ki” co-organized by Asia Society Museum and Colby College Museum of Art, is the first retrospective of the work of Zao Wou-Ki (1920–2013) in the United States. The exhibition aims to reintroduce American audiences to the singular achievements of this pioneering Chinese-French artist, who melded eastern and western aesthetic sensibilities in his paintings, as a key figure within post-World War II abstraction.

“No Limits: Zao Wou-Ki” takes its title from the Chinese meaning of Wou-Ki, “without limitation,” a state of being that the artist embodied through his art. One of the first artists of the Chinese diaspora to achieve international recognition, Zao was born in Beijing and spent his formative years in Shanghai and Hangzhou, where he pursued artistic study at the China Academy of Art. In 1948, he emigrated from Shanghai to Paris, where he was championed by French intellectuals and artists and in subsequent years became a major fixture in the European art world. In the 1950s and 1960s, American museums and private collectors avidly acquired his paintings, and his work was shown in numerous exhibitions including a 1968 solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art, the last American museum show of Zao’s work until now.

The importance of Zao’s work derives from his singular adaption of visual characteristics of Chinese art within twentieth-century oil-painting idioms. In Zao’s hands, abstraction reflected the encounter between two worlds and embraces both European modernism and Chinese metaphysical principles. His groundbreaking internationalist aesthetic marks him as a key figure of twentieth-century transculturalism.

“No Limits: Zao Wou-Ki” comprises 49 works in oil, ink, print, and watercolor, spanning more than six decades and includes loans from major institutions in the United States and in Europe. The exhibition is curated by Melissa Walt and Ankeney Weitz, Colby College Museum of Art, and Michelle Yun, Asia Society Museum.

“No Limits: Zao Wou-Ki” is organized into three sections. The first, Calligraphy is the Starting Point, shows a transitional moment in Zao’s work during the mid-1950s to mid-1960s. His early mastery of Chinese ink and brush techniques had led him to seek the challenges of painting in oil. But after several years in Paris, he looked back to his formative training as he shaped his artistic voice. “Paradoxically, it is to Paris that I owe my return to my [Chinese] roots,” Zao commented in 1961.

The second section of the exhibition, To Learn is To Create, showcases earlier works made between 1945 and 1954, a period in which Zao tapped diverse visual traditions and methods, ranging from European painters such as Paul Cézanne, Marc Chagall, and Paul Klee, to ancient Chinese bronze inscriptions, rubbings from Han-dynasty tomb decorations, and Tang- and Song-dynasty landscape paintings. The third section, A Place to Wander, looks at his mature works across the mediums of oil, ink, and watercolor, painted between 1965 and 2007, that embrace abstraction while exploring landscape, scenery, and the forces of nature.

 

 

Website : Asia Society Museum

  

Source : Artdaily

 

12381 - 20170102 - Exhibition at LACMA celebrates the formidable legacy of Gemini G.E.L - Los Angeles - 11.09.2016-02.01.2017

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Roy Lichtenstein, Reclining Nude, 1980, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gift of Dorothy Lichtenstein, © 1980 Estate of Roy Lichtenstein / Gemini G.E.L., photo © Museum Associates/LACMA.

 

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art presents a major exhibition celebrating the formidable legacy of Gemini G.E.L. (Graphic Editions Limited), the renowned Los Angeles workshop and publisher that has transformed American printmaking and the Los Angeles arts community. The Serial Impulse at Gemini G.E.L. explores the workshop’s collaborative methods and embrace of technical innovation, which provided artists with the resources to produce groundbreaking work, through notable serial projects. For centuries, artists have produced series to develop thematic, narrative, literary, and formal imagery in a sequential manner. This practice was especially prevalent in the 1960s as Conceptual, Minimalist, and Pop artists adopted the serial format to explore the potential of systems and structures related to such notions as rational order and mass production. Artists at Gemini have engaged, and continue to engage, a variety of approaches to serial production, resulting in some of the workshop’s most significant publications. The Serial Impulse at Gemini G.E.L. presents a selection of these notable projects, many of which have rarely been displayed in their entirety, from seminal works by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Frank Stella to more recent series by Julie Mehretu and Richard Serra.

The Serial Impulse at Gemini G.E.L. was organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, on the occasion of Gemini’s 50th anniversary, where it was on view October 4, 2015–February 7, 2016. LACMA’s exhibition—co-curated by Leslie Jones, curator of prints and drawings, and Naoko Takahatake, associate curator of prints and drawings— showcases nine of the 17 serial projects presented in Washington, D.C. Unique to the Los Angeles presentation is a selection of seven additional serial projects drawn from the museum’s permanent collection with supplemental loans from Gemini G.E.L. and the Grinstein family. Furthermore, the Los Angeles exhibition highlights meaningful connections forged between the artists, Gemini, and LACMA over the past 50 years. For example, LACMA premiered Gemini G.E.L.’s very first artist edition in 1966—a series of prints by Josef Albers called White Line Squares.

“For the past half-century the work produced at Gemini has informed the aesthetic sensibilities of Los Angeles’s culture. To this day, Gemini remains a highly influential and pioneering workshop,” said Michael Govan, LACMA CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director. “Pivotal works produced at Gemini have been integral to the museum’s permanent collection, monographic exhibitions, and programs.”

“Gemini’s spirit of collaboration and its technical experimentation fostered significant artistic achievement,” commented co-curators Leslie Jones and Naoko Takahatake. “Gemini has worked with the most notable and influential artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, and The Serial Impulse at Gemini G.E.L. proudly presents landmarks of American printmaking from the past five decades.”

Co-founder Sidney Felsen adds, "Gemini started in 1966 as a lithography studio, and by 1968 we completed our first sculpture edition. Within a few years, etching, screenprinting and woodblock printing were added as well as three-dimensional editions using metal, wood, fabrics, rubber, plastic—anything the artist wanted. We've always told the artists they can work in any medium or combination of media they chose, and they are encouraged to experiment as much as needed and stay as long as they possibly can."

 

 

Website : Los Angeles County Museum of Art

 

Source : Artdaily

 

12380 - 20170115 - Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum marks 10th anniversary with installation - St. Louis, MO - 09.09.2016-15.01.2017

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Jackson Pollock (American, 1912–1956), Sleeping Effort, 1953. Oil and duco enamel on canvas, 49 7/8 x 76". Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis. University purchase, Bixby Fund, 1954. © 2016 Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

 

A collection is not a static thing, a project to be finished. A collection lives and breathes and evolves over time. It is shaped and sharpened by changing circumstances, changing priorities and changing interpretations. A collection is not an answer, but a lens through which to question the world.

As one of the oldest university museums in the nation, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis has long focused on acquiring significant art of its time. This fall, the museum marks the 10th anniversary of its Fumihiko Maki-designed facility with an ambitious, building-wide installation — the largest the museum has ever mounted — of its esteemed permanent collection.

“Real / Radical / Psychological: The Collection on Display” steps back from a decade of thematic presentations and, for the first time ever, presents the permanent collection in chronological fashion. Divided into three galleries — “The Long Nineteenth Century,” “Modernism and the Twentieth Century” and “Contemporary Moments” — the installation will provide new context for familiar highlights while also featuring rarely seen works and pieces that have been transformed through recent conservation.

Throughout each of the galleries, the leitmotifs real, radical and psychological illuminate how these notions have guided artistic production from the nineteenth century to today.

“Real” encompasses various approaches to depicting the visible world, both illusionistic and abstracted, as well as more subjective interpretations of a given reality. “Radical” includes politically driven aesthetic practices, particularly those that challenge artistic traditions and conventions, often resulting in images of both utopian and dystopian futures. “Psychological” investigates conceptions of the self and the internal world as well as the volatile states of the unconscious mind and its bodily manifestations.

‘The Long Nineteenth Century’

Presented in a salon-style hang in the museum’s Garen Gallery, “The Long Nineteenth Century” reflects the richness of the museum’s collection of landscapes, genre painting, and portraiture, along with a rotating display from the vast collection of works on paper, from an era that stretches from the time of the American and French revolutions of the late eighteenth century to the dawn of World War I in 1914. This era witnessed radical ruptures and transformations that led to the creation of new nations and constitutional governments and to major advances in communication, technology and trade.

In the first half of the century, artists associated with Romanticism challenged Enlightenment values of empiricism, secularization and rationality, stressing subjective individualism and emotion. Within this context landscape became a newly independent genre capable of conveying personal and often spiritual experiences, as shown in a variety of works by the French Barbizon school and American Hudson River school painters.

By mid-century, Realism arose as a critical manifestation of certain artists’ concerns with creating a truly democratic art that would represent the material condition of contemporary life. Empirical observation of the exterior world became a particular concern for many artists as numerous scientific and technological innovations changed the way the world is measured and how goods are produced and distributed.

Leading American Realist painter Thomas Eakins’ “Portrait of Professor W. D. Marks” (1886) captures both the likeness and equipment of a prominent electrical engineer in meticulous detail, aided by the technology of photography. In France, the figure of the peasant was a particularly popular subject for Realist artists, whether used in anecdotal contexts such as Jules Breton’s tavern scene (1858), or in works that sought to capture the realities of agrarian labor in detail, as in Léon Lhermitte’s harvesting scene (1883).

‘Modernism and the Twentieth Century’

In the Bernoudy Permanent Collection Gallery, “Modernism and the Twentieth Century” presents art from the early 20th century through the postwar years — a period that includes some of the collection’s most important works of European and American modernism. Both propelled by, and reacting against, the realities of modern progress, and in response to the brutality of two devastating world wars, artists visualized the human condition through new and often experimental modes of expression.

Various forms of abstraction and semi-abstraction emerged in such radical movements as Expressionism, Cubism, Constructivism, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism. For example, Theo Van Doesburg’s “Compositie VII: de drie Gratiën (Composition VII: The Three Graces)” (1917) presents a dynamic interplay of abstract form and color that — via its title — references a trio of female dancers. The artist prized dance as much as abstract art as an expressive and creative form, revealing his faith in the promise of utopian new worlds.

By contrast, Marsden Hartley’s abstracted “The Iron Cross” (1915) uses both recognizable symbols and abstract shapes to pay homage to a German officer and friend killed during the early stages of World War I. Paintings by artists including Max Beckmann, Karl Zerbe and Max Ernst mediate experiences of exile and loss during World War II.

The bold gestures of Willem de Kooning’s “Saturday Night” (1956) suggest the external and dynamic effects of American postwar urban industrial culture on individual experience, while French artist Pierre Soulages’ large-scale “Peinture 200 x 265 cm, 20 mai 1959 (Painting 200 x 265 cm, 20 May 1959)” (1959), delves into the internal qualities of painting, connecting the medium to the physical process of its making.

‘Contemporary Moments’

In the Barney A. Ebsworth Gallery, “Contemporary Moments” includes works by an international array of artists from the late 1960s until today. During this cacophonous period, much artistic focus shifted away from progressive modernist paradigms and toward a material and conceptual pluralism.

Valie Export, Howardena Pindell and Martha Rosler, among others, produced charged artworks that variously incorporate newly emerging art forms such as performance, language, photography and video to question underlying structures of social control and oppression. Employing parody, pointed critique, and, in the case of Export’s “Touch Cinema” (1968), radical self-exposure and provocation, these artists confronted normative assumptions of gender, race and the ways the mass media shape perceptions of identity.

Barbara Kruger’s adoption of advertising techniques emphasized the coercive authority of language while work by Renée Cox and Catherine Opie, among many others, brought renewed attention to the politics of the body — be it the black male body in the case of Cox’s photographic collage, or the gay, lesbian and transgendered subjects of Opie’s reverent photographic portraiture.

Many recent acquisitions will be highlighted here as well, reflecting a range of contemporary artistic positions that give visual expression to the impact of the new digital age and the associated paradoxes of unprecedented mobility and virtual technologies. These include works that expand the practice of painting via digital design methods, as exemplified in the art of Michel Majerus or Corinne Wasmuht, and others who create large-scale, seductive photographs, such as those by Andreas Gursky, Trevor Paglen and Wolfgang Tillmans, which seem to question the indexical quality of the medium.

In addition, four works in the museum’s May Department Stores Foyer cross the timeframe of the overall installation, each reflecting distinct points of intersection between art and politics, including American slavery, World War II, the Vietnam war, and 9/11 and its aftermath (respectively): Thomas Ball’s “Freedom’s Memorial” (1875), Alexander Calder’s “Bayonets Menacing a Flower” (1945), Robert Rauschenberg’s “Choke” (1964) and Alfredo Jaar’s “May 1, 2011” (2011).

 

 

 

Website : Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum

 

Source : Artdaily

 

12379 - 20170212 - Site-specific work by Terri Friedman on view in Berkeley, CA - 25.08.2016-12.02.2017

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Terri Friedman: If you are hit on the head with a kaleidoscope, does that mean you see stars? (detail), 2016; acrylic, wool, and cotton fibers; courtesy of the artist. Photo: Sibila Savage.

 

The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive presents Art Wall: Terri Friedman, on view from August 25, 2016 through February 12, 2017. For the second in BAMPFA’s series of site-specific works commissioned for the 24 x 64-foot Art Wall, Director Lawrence Rinder invited East Bay artist Terri Friedman to create what she calls a “yarn painting.” This ten-panel, mural-scaled textile of hand-tinted and commercially dyed organic and synthetic fibers, entitled If you are hit on the head with a kaleidoscope, does that mean you see stars?, is the largest artwork Friedman has made. The title refers to the artist’s desire to create “a wake-up wall, something that might speak to time and place.” Terri Friedman has explored a wide variety of media in her artistic career but only recently turned to weaving. She was inspired by a mural-sized tapestry designed by Joan Miró and woven by artist Josep Royo that she saw on a 2013 trip to Barcelona, Spain. She is interested in the texture and fibers of yarn, an attraction that began in her grandmother’s knitting room, noting that “we are sensual beings, materials matter.” Friedman’s bold use of color is inspired by her travels in India and her childhood during the psychedelic sixties: “Color is emotion,” she states.” Color has the potential to uplift, destroy, calm, energize, make you anxious. It is potent like a drug.” If you are hit on the head with a kaleidoscope, does that mean you see stars? addresses contemporary issues. While weaving the pieces for this monumental textile on her four-foot loom, Friedman was experiencing “all the unhinged aspects of the contemporary world,” from senseless acts of terror and violence, both in the United States and abroad, to the divisiveness of the presidential campaign, as well as the death of a close friend. The work consists of three sections that reflect this context: inspiration or radioactivity on the left, a calmer patchwork transition area in the center, and the right side about light coming through loss, a memorial. “The climate is radioactive and so are the woven panels,” Friedman says. “The wall is purposefully colorful and bright in the face of difficult times. The term ‘violent pretty’ keeps coming to mind. Ultimately lightness outshines darkness. Grief and anger are not darkness. Fear and indifference are. I wanted an electricity or radioactivity that mirrored the time and place.” Born in Colorado and educated in Rhode Island, India, and Los Angeles, Friedman is an artist, teacher, mother, and global traveler. She received her MFA from the Claremont Graduate School and has exhibited her work widely, including at the Patricia Sweetow Gallery, San Francisco; the Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Los Angeles; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; the Cheryl Numark Gallery, Washington DC; and the Torrance Art Museum in Torrance, California. She is a senior adjunct professor at the California College of the Arts. Weaving is Friedman’s latest step in a continuum of painting, sculpture, fiber, collaboration, community, social media, and pedagogy.     Website : Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive       Source : Artdaily

12378 - 20170116 - Exhibition at Norton Simon Museum explores unsettling and thought-provoking works of art - Pasadena, CA - 02.09.2016-16.01.2017

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Edward Kienholz (American, 1927–1994), The Secret House of Eddie Critch, 1961. Assemblage: drop-front wood veneered writing desk; with traces of paint, containing plastic doll parts, leather, wood, chicken wire, and animal fur, 24 x 32-1/4 x 13 in. (61.0 x 81.9 x 33.0 cm). Norton Simon Museum, Gift of Mrs. Sadye J. Moss, P.1966.01.4 © 2016 Estate of Edward Kienholz.

 

The Norton Simon Museum presents Dark Visions: Mid-Century Macabre, an intimate exhibition that explores unsettling and thought-provoking works of art by some of the 20th century’s most influential artists, among them Bruce Conner, Joseph Cornell, George Herms and Edward Kienholz. The 14 works on view—comprising assemblage, painting and lithography—demonstrate the ways in which artists have portrayed humankind’s struggle to face death and life’s tribulations—whether through catharsis, psychosis or a portrayal of horrors.

While the works on view span media and decades, many share similar characteristics: the palettes are muted blacks and browns, space is restricted, and figures and forms regularly find themselves in boxes, or (even) include boxes themselves. These boxes suggest a chaos, a struggle to overcome the confines of the frame. With Lust Murder Box No. 2 from 1920–22, artist Kurt Schwitters hired master wood craftsman Albert Schulze to make a small box using intarsia—a wood veneer inlay technique—so that the work resembled his collages and the constructed overlaid forms of architecture in his famous Merzbau studio. According to Kate Steinitz, an early collaborator of Schwitters and donor of the artwork to the Museum, the title is based on a damaged plaster figure that once lay in the box and which the artist daubed with lipstick to make it look “bloody.”

Using more traditional materials, Jack Edward Stuck envisions himself as a silhouetted profile strapped into a gas chamber chair in his painting Self-Portrait from 1960–61. The viewer voyeuristically looks in through one of the portholes of the chamber to see the artist calmly awaiting execution. Stuck does not rely on an overflow of materials to impart a sinister feel. The flat handling of the paint and the faint pencil lines lend a disquieting sense of foreboding.

A more viscerally vicious act is depicted in the lithograph Combat from 1965, by Leon Golub. Here, two forms are intertwined in violence, as one combatant raises a fist over the other. The bold, slashing lines lend themselves to the frenetic pace and anxiety of the physical confrontation—so much so, that there is no delineation between one assailant and the other in this struggle for power. Golub does not hide anything from viewers; he puts this clash between two bodies front and center, forcing them to confront their own fears of brutality.

Other works of art in the exhibition include Jess’ illuminated Assembly Lamp Eight, 1966—a seemingly old-fashioned lamp whose shade is comprised of photographs and glass lantern slides; Conner’s HOMAGE TO MINNIE MOUSE, 1959, a dark and mesmerizing assemblage with decomposing architectural features and fabric; Kienholz’s The Secret House of Eddie Critch, 1961, an old writing-desk inhabited by dismembered doll parts and animal fur; and Connor Everts’ Now the Act Is Consummated from his seminal Studies in Desperation lithographic series of late 1963, created in part as a response to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

 

 

Website : Norton Simon Museum

 

Source : Artdaily

 

12375 - 20170129 - San Antonio Museum of Art presents exhibition of works by Carlos Mérida - San Antonio, TX - 08.07.2016-29.01.2017

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Carlos Mérida, Untitled, 1925·1927. Sin titulo. Part of lmagenes de Guatemala. Lithograph; 9 x 13 in. San Antonio Museum of Art, Purchased with funds by the Friends of Latin American Art in memory of Ted Warm.

 

The San Antonio Museum of Art is presenting Carlos Mérida: Selections From the Permanent Collection, July 8, 2016 through January 29, 2017 in the Golden Gallery. This small exhibition features 30 works that express Mérida’s diversity of themes and media, and show his progression as an artist. This selection is from the Museum’s archives.

“Mérida is one of the first artists to fuse European modern painting to Latin American themes,” said Curator of Latin American Art Marion Oettinger. “It’s exciting to share these works from the Museum’s archives with the public.”

Born in Guatemala, Mérida paid homage to his own preColumbian roots through figurative illustrations of the ancient Maya world and the indigenous populations of his youth. He then went on to become one of Mexico's first successful abstract artists. Mérida lived and worked in Mexico for much of his life but was inspired by his travels in Europe. In 1910, he visited Paris and became intrigued by the avant-garde artists, such as Modigliani and Picasso. Mérida returned to Europe in the late 1920s, and fell under the influence of Surrealism, Constructivism, and Geometric Abstraction.

The Museum has acquired excellent examples of Mérida’s works, and its collection illustrates the artist’s broad diversity of themes and media –from his Images of Guatemala (1925-27) to his Birds of Paradise (1936) and his The Three Kings (1965). In 2014, the Museum acquired an important set of Mérida’s original gouaches, which were used to create the artist’s popular portfolio Mexican Costume (1941) of 25 serigraphs. Lastly, the large and impressive glass mosaic mural that Mérida made for Hemisfair’68 has been reinstalled in the newly refurbished Convention Center.

 

 

Website : San Antonio Museum of Art

 

Source : Artdaily

12374 - 20170108 - Hans Memling's Triptych of Jan Crabbe reunited in exhibition at The Morgan - N?ew York - 02.09.2016-08.01.2017

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Hans Memling (Flemish, ca. 1440–1494), The Triptych of Jan Crabbe, ca. 1467-70. Oil on panel. Center panel: Image courtesy of Pinacoteca Civica di Palazzo Chiericati, Vicenza. Left and right panels: © The Morgan Library & Museum, Photography by Graham S. Haber.

 

Completed around 1470 in Bruges, Hans Memling’s extraordinary Triptych of Jan Crabbe was dismantled centuries ago and the parts were scattered. The inner wings from the altarpiece are among the finest paintings owned by the Morgan Library & Museum, where they have long been on permanent view in museum founder Pierpont Morgan’s study. Hans Memling: Portraiture, Piety, and a Reunited Altarpiece, opening on September 2, reunites the Morgan panels with the other elements of the famous triptych: the central panel from the Musei Civici in Vicenza, Italy, and the outer wings from the Groeningemuseum in Bruges, Belgium. This exhibition—on view through January 8, 2017—is the first to explore the reconstructed masterpiece in context. The altarpiece will be surrounded by other paintings by Memling and his contemporaries, by a choice selection of illuminated manuscripts from Bruges, and by a group of Early Netherlandish drawings. Aside from the triptych fragments from Italy and Belgium, loans from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Frick Collection, and a private collection will complement a range of works from the Morgan’s own holdings. “It is always meaningful—and moving—to see a great work of art made whole again,” said Colin B. Bailey, director of the Morgan Library & Museum. “The Crabbe triptych is a masterpiece of the first order and shows a relatively young Memling demonstrating many of the characteristic elements of his work—crystalline realism, spatial sophistication, and the ability to capture the humanity and individuality of his subjects. We are delighted to offer visitors the opportunity to see this work in its full glory for the first time in the U.S. and to explore the artistic milieu in which it was created.” THE EXHIBITION I. Triptych of Jan Crabbe Morgan acquired the triptych’s inner wings in 1907. They were part of an altarpiece commissioned by Jan Crabbe, Abbot of the Cistercian monastery of Ten Duinen, near Bruges, Belgium. On the central panel, Memling depicted the crucifixion of Christ, with the Virgin Mary, St. John the Evangelist, and St. Mary Magdalene to the left of the cross. Kneeling to the right of the cross is Jan Crabbe, accompanied by his name-saint St. John the Baptist and St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the founder of the Cistercian order. The two inner wings depict members of the patron’s family: his mother Anna Willemzoon with St. Anne on the left, and his much younger half-brother Willem de Winter with St. William on the right. The outer wings, originally visible only when the panels are closed, feature an Annunciation scene with the Angel Gabriel and the Virgin Mary. It is not known precisely when or why the work was dismantled, though it was not unusual for composite pieces such as triptychs to suffer this fate. The Triptych of Jan Crabbe is a fine demonstration of Memling’s extraordinary ability to capture the essence of the human face. In particular, the left panel portrait of Anna Willemzoon is one of the most frank and extraordinary depictions of old age from the Renaissance. Indeed, in later years, Memling’s portraiture would come to revolutionize the genre across Europe. Similarly transformative, the Annunciation scene features Gabriel and the Virgin Mary clad in white drapery and set on pedestals in niches like sculptures, but with rosy flesh tones in their heads and hands, making them one of the earliest examples of the technique of demigrisaille in Flemish painting. II. Triptych of Jan Crabbe in Context Paintings by Memling and his Contemporaries Several independent portrait paintings from Memling’s early and late career offer further evidence of Memling’s extraordinary talent as a portraitist. Although Memling’s painterly style developed as he grew older, his ability to capture the essence of his sitters’ personalities never changed. Memling did not work in isolation, and a painting representing the Virgin and Child with St. Anne by a contemporary artist known as the Master of the Saint Ursula Legend provides an ideal counterpart to the triptych with its broad landscape and similar iconography. It shows how Memling’s production fits alongside that of other painters in Bruges, while also highlighting how his technical abilities surpassed most others. Manuscript Illumination in Bruges In the fifteenth century, Bruges was an important center for manuscript illumination. Memling’s development of the demigrisaille technique has generally been traced to his time spent in Cologne, but in fact, varieties of grisaille and demi-grisaille were regularly used in Bruges manuscript illumination in the decades prior to the painting of the Crabbe triptych, as will be shown with a selection of Books of Hours from the Morgan’s rich holdings. Conversely, the radical naturalism of Memling’s painting seems to have served as an inspiration to the manuscript painters. Superb manuscripts from the Morgan’s collection will show that reflections of Memling’s painting technique began to appear in manuscript painting towards the end of the fifteenth century. Drawings by Memling’s Contemporaries and Followers No original drawings by Memling survive, and those by his contemporaries are extremely rare, but it is clear that drawing played a fundamental part of his artistic practice. Several exquisite drawings by Memling’s contemporaries and followers from the Morgan and the Metropolitan Museum of Art will give an impression of the array of drawing types Memling must have executed in his lifetime. III. Beneath the Surface: Technical Study of the Crabbe Triptych Technical study of the Jan Crabbe panels has revealed fascinating aspects of the altarpiece’s evolution. With infrared imaging (IRR), Memling’s graphic style can be seen in the lively underdrawings that lie beneath the layers of paint. Differences between the underdrawing and painting show that Memling made changes to the initial composition. X-radiographs show that he also made changes during the actual painting process     Website :  Morgan Library & Museum        Source : Artdaily

12371 - 20170205 - Dallas Museum of Art premieres first U.S. museum solo project of Nicolas Party - Dallas, TX - 19.08.2016-05.02.2017

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Nicolas Party, Two Men with Hats, 2016, pastel on canvas, courtesy of the artist and The Modern Institute/Toby Webster, Ltd., Glasgow, © Nicolas Party.

 

The Dallas Museum of Art presents Swiss artist Nicolas Party’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States. The DMA-commissioned mural Pathway occupies the Museum’s Concourse, a public space that functions as the DMA’s main thoroughfare. For three weeks, Party worked on-site to transform the corridor into an immersive, vibrantly colored landscape mural that was largely inspired by its location within the Museum. Instead of functioning like a gallery, the mural emphasizes the fact that it is a walkway, and transforms the space into an indoor path. Nicolas Party: Pathway is on view August 19, 2016, through February 5, 2017.

The historical and the contemporary collide throughout Party’s work, as he is known for reinterpreting traditional genres such as still lifes and portraiture. Central to his practice is also the consideration of the physical and social contexts of his work. Party draws from a wide range of art historical influences, including the graphic landscape renderings of David Hockney, the bright color planes of the Fauves, and the flat figures found in medieval Christian paintings. Pathway builds upon the history of landscape painting, populating the Concourse walls with trees, bushes, and shrubs rendered in the artist’s distinctively vivid palette and flat, simplified style. This mural reframes the act of walking through the corridor as a stroll through a park or a journey into a forest. In response to Dallas’s warm climate, Pathway also provides a welcoming shelter from the sun in which visitors are invited to metaphorically seek shade among the trees and cool off beneath the deep blue sky. Accompanying the mural is Two Men with Hats, a pastel portrait that Party created specifically for his exhibition at the DMA.

“We are pleased to welcome Nicolas to North Texas and proud to be the home of his first stateside solo exhibition. It has been fascinating to see how he took into account the current usage of the space by visitors and features that are specific to Dallas, like the extreme heat of summer,” stated Gavin Delahunty, Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art. “His lively mural will welcome guests to escape from the outside elements as they stroll through a now enchanting passage.”

Nicolas Party (b. 1980, Lausanne, Switzerland) lives and works in Brussels, Belgium. He was an active graffiti artist in the 1990s before earning his BFA from the Lausanne School of Art and his MFA from the Glasgow School of Art. Party had his first solo exhibition, Teapots, Bread and Sausages, in 2010 at La Placette in his hometown of Lausanne, Switzerland. Recent solo exhibitions of his work have been presented at CAN: Centre d’art Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, Switzerland (2016), Inverleith House, Edinburgh, Scotland (2015), Kunsthall Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway (2014), Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris (2014), and Swiss Institute, New York (2012), among others. Later this year, Party will produce a mural at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

Nicolas Party: Pathway is organized by the Dallas Museum of Art. The presentation is made possible by TWO x TWO for AIDS and Art, an annual fundraising event that jointly benefits amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research and the Dallas Museum of Art, and by the Contemporary Art Initiative. The exhibition is included in free general admission. The exhibition is curated by Nolan Jimbo, Temporary Project Coordinator, with Gavin Delahunty, Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art

 

 

Website : Dallas Museum of Art

 

Source : Artdaily

 

12370 - 20170212 - Exhibition at Saint Louis Art Museum explores the brutality of war - St. Louis, MO - 05.08.2016-12.02.2017

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Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, Spanish, 1746-1828; plates from portfolio The Disasters of War, 1810-1820, published 1863; etching and lavis; 8 1/2 x 14 1/4 x 1 3/8 inches; Saint Louis Art Museum, The Marian Cronheim Trust for Prints and Drawings 7:2015

 

The Saint Louis Art Museum is presenting Impressions of War, an exhibition featuring The Disasters of War, Francisco de Goya’s 80-plate contemplation of war and its aftereffects, as well as additional series of prints by three artists whose works equally respond to the darker side of war and its aftermath.

Organized as a counterpart to the upcoming exhibition Conflicts of Interest: Art and War in Modern Japan, Impressions of War shows alternative approaches to the tragedies of war. The free exhibition is on view in galleries 234 and 235 from Aug. 5 through Feb. 12, 2017.

Responding to the French occupation of Spain by Napoleon Bonaparte between 1808 and 1814, The Disasters of War stands as one of the major achievements in the history of European art. Although Goya made the prints between 1810 and 1820, they were not formally published until 1863, more than three decades after his death.

The series broke ground with the intensity of its focus on war’s cruelties, yet the prints also shed light on the bravery of the Spanish people on the ground in the face of foreign occupation.

The artist’s fearless and personal approach to the topic of war sets it apart from official military imagery celebrating triumphs on the battlefield or the deaths of great generals. Instead, some plates concentrate on unmentionable brutality between soldiers and civilians as evidenced by the harrowing display in This is Worse, while others highlight the heroism of individuals, such as in Neither do These, in which women resist sexual attacks from the enemy.

Impressions of War also includes print series by three other artists in France, Germany, and the United States from the 17th to the 21st centuries in which the artists respond—as Goya did—on a personal rather than an official level.

Jacques Callot produced the earliest European print series chronicling the “miseries” of the great upheaval—largely sparked by religious conflict—that rocked Europe during the mid-17th century, establishing a tradition that inspired many artists after him. Callot’s petite scenes portray in exceptional detail the deeds and misdeeds of enlisted men and civilians during unstable times.

Max Beckmann’s portfolio Hell scrutinizes the bloody political clashes and material hardship that afflicted Berlin in the months following World War I. In Martyrdom, for example, Beckmann portrays the murder of the prominent communist leader Rosa Luxemburg, whose lifeless, outstretched body he depicts in the form of a cross.

Daniel Heyman’s Amman Portfolio—the most recent of the four series—responds to the earlier series even as it departs from them. Heyman was invited to witness interviews of Iraqi citizens who had been detained and tortured in the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and he produced eight descriptive drypoint portraits with fragments excerpted from the traumatic interviews.

Impressions of War is curated by Elizabeth Wyckoff, curator of prints, drawings, and photographs; Leah Chizek, research assistant; and Ann-Maree Walker, senior research assistant, and Gretchen Wagner, Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Prints, Drawings, and Photographs. .

 

 

Website : Saint Louis Art Museum

  

Source : Artdaily